Visions of Heat

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Authors: Nalini Singh

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Visions of Heat
Psy-Changeling [2]
Nalini Singh
Penguin Group USA, Inc. (2010)

Hailed as a major new talent in paranormal romance, Nalini Singh takes us deeper into the world of the Psy and the changelings in her latest extraordinary novel, where a gifted woman sees passion in her future-a passion that is absolutely forbidden by her kind... Used to cold silence, Faith NightStar is suddenly being tormented by dark visions of blood and murder. A bad sign for anyone, but worse for Faith, an F-Psy with the highly sought after ability to predict the future. Then the visions show her something even more dangerous-aching need...exquisite pleasure. But so powerful is her sight, so fragile the state of her mind, that the very emotions she yearns to embrace could be the end of her. Changeling Vaughn D'Angelo can take either man or jaguar form, but it is his animal side that is overwhelmingly drawn to Faith. The jaguar's instinct is to claim this woman it finds so utterly fascinating and the man has no argument. But while Vaughn craves sensation and hungers to...

Table of Contents
 
 
Dark Encounter
“I am
not
a leopard,” he said into her ear, and the sound was so rough she wondered if he’d come back fully from the animal.
“Oh.” Her mistake was no surprise—she knew less than nothing about the reality of changelings. Her world had never been one where they intruded. “I apologize for offending you.”
“Aren’t you curious what I am?”
“Yes.” She was also curious about his human face. “Can I turn around?”
His soft chuckle vibrated along her body and demanded her complete attention. “It’s not that dark, Red—I didn’t have any clothes with me.”
It took a few moments for her brain to work through that statement. The second she did, she became hyperconscious of the sheer heat of the body aligned so closely to her own. The part of her that craved new experiences wanted to turn, but she knew that would be sheer foolishness. This man was hardly likely to indulge her intellectual curiosity about his body. He’d almost bitten off her head for daring to call him the wrong species.
“Please let go.”
“No.”
The flat no took her by surprise. Nobody said no to her, not like that. They always tried to couch it in more polite terms. That treatment may have kept her cooperative and rational, but it had also left her no tools with which to deal with the hard reality of a world where people didn’t follow the accepted rules of behavior. “Why?”
“Why not?”
Berkley Sensation titles by Nalini Singh
SLAVE TO SENSATION
VISIONS OF HEAT
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
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South Africa
 
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
 
VISIONS OF HEAT
 
A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author
 
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / March 2007
 
Copyright © 2007 by Nalini Singh.
 
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
 
eISBN : 978-1-440-67456-3
 
BERKLEY SENSATION
®
Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY SENSATION is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
 
 
 

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This one’s for my Mum, Usha,
the most extraordinary woman I know.
With love.
MADNESS
Clinical insanity.
The number one cause of death for F-Psy before Silence.
Death by insanity? For the F-Psy, it was very much a harsh reality. They became lost in the visions of the future their minds created—so lost that they forgot to eat, forgot to drink, and, in extreme cases, forgot to make their hearts beat. The Psy are their minds, and once those minds are lost, their bodies can no longer function.
But the dead were the fortunate ones. Those who broke under the pressure of the visions and yet survived were no longer sentient, no longer anything close to sentient, their minds locked in a world where the past, present, and future clashed and splintered over and over. As time fractured, so did they.
Surprisingly, the F-Psy were divided about the implementation of the Silence Protocol. Some thought it would be a precious gift to feel no emotion, for then they’d be safe from the threat of insanity, safe from the hideous illusions of their minds . . .
safe
. But there were others who saw Silence as an act of betrayal against their very gifts. The F-Psy had stopped countless massacres, saved countless lives, done endless good, but they had done it all with emotion. Without emotion, their abilities would be controllable, but crippled.
It took ten years, but the proponents of Silence won the mental battle raged across the millions of minds in the PsyNet. As a result, the F-Psy stopped foreseeing the human darkness of the future and withdrew into the sheltered walls of the business world. Instead of the saviors of innocents, they became the most powerful tools of many a Psy enterprise. The Psy Council declared their services too valuable to share with the other races and gradually, the F-Psy disappeared from public view.
It is said they prefer to remain out of the limelight.
What very few know, what the Council has hidden for over a century, is that though they are wealthy and cosseted, the once-resilient F-Psy have become the most fragile of beings. Something about their ability to foresee the tangled threads of what could be leaves them unable to function fully in the real world, necessitating constant surveillance and care.
The F-Psy rarely travel, rarely mingle, rarely function on any level aside from the mental. Some of them are close to mute, able to communicate their visions and only their visions, by scattered bursts of sound or, in severe cases, through diagram and gesture. The rest of the time, they remain locked in their Silent world.
Yet the Council says this is what they were meant to be.
CHAPTER 1
Faith NightStar
of the PsyClan NightStar was aware she was considered the most powerful F-Psy of her generation. At only twenty-four years of age, she’d already made more money than most Psy did in their entire lifetimes. But then again, she’d been working since she was three years old, since she’d found her voice. It had taken her longer than most children, but that was to be expected—she was a cardinal F-Psy of extraordinary ability.
It would have surprised no one if she’d never spoken.
That was why the F-Psy belonged to PsyClans, which took care of everything the foreseers couldn’t, from investing their millions to checking their medical status to ensuring they didn’t starve. The F-Psy weren’t very good at practical things like that. They forgot. Even after more than a century of forecasting business trends rather than murders and accidents, disasters and wars, they forgot.
Faith had been forgetting a lot of things lately. For example, she’d forgotten to eat three days in a row. That was when NightStar employees had intervened, alerted by the sophisticated Tec 3 computer that ran the house. Three days was the allowable window—sometimes F-Psy went into trances. If that had been the case, they would’ve put her on a drip and left her to it. “Thank you,” she said, directing her words to the head M-Psy. “I’ll be fine now.”
Xi Yun nodded. “Finish the entire meal. It contains the exact number of calories you need.”
“Of course.” She watched him leave, preceded by his staff. In his hand was a small medical kit that she knew contained both chemicals designed to shock her awake out of a catatonic trance and ones to knock her down from a manic state. Neither had been required today. She’d simply forgotten to eat.
After consuming all the nutritional bars and energy drinks he’d left behind, she sat back down in the large reclining chair where she usually spent the majority of her time. Designed to double as a bed, it was uplinked to the Tec 3 and fed it a constant stream of data about her vital functions. An M-Psy stood on alert should she need medical attention any time of day or night. That wasn’t normal procedure even for the F designation, but Faith was no ordinary F-Psy.

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